Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought

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Daniel Pick

Both Paley and Malthus afforded Darwin much food for thought; ‘nature

has scattered the seeds of life abroad with the most profuse and liberal hand’,

Malthus had declared. Slaughter, it could be argued, was utterly necessary.

For otherwise each tiny square of Earth would be overrun by millions of

clamouring creatures. Malthus’ lesson: inﬁnite multiplication and crowding

are necessarily held in check by waste, sickness, destruction, misery and vice:

population, unchecked, necessarily outstripped resources: ‘I see no way by

which man can escape from the weight of this law which pervades all

animal nature’ (Malthus 1988,p.72). For Darwin, the imbalance between

population and resources is not to be understood as a ﬂaw in the system

of nature; on the contrary, it constitutes the necessary mechanism, the very

precondition of natural selection.

2 Science and authority

In the age of Darwin, words such as ‘science’ and ‘scientist’ were often

invoked to convey a sense of moral and political impartiality. ‘Scientist’ was

eventually to suggest a member of a trained, professional (salaried) caste,

but it was also to be adopted to connote a particular kind of neutral stance.

Such credentials were strongly claimed, for instance, by Darwin’s polymath

cousin, Francis Galton (1822–1911), even as he advocated policies that were

anything but value-free. Darwin, who had thought very highly of some of

Galton’s earlier work,

died before the latter’s full eugenic ambitions had

become apparent, and we can only speculate on whether he would have

considered these equally admirable.

Galton coined the word ‘eugenics’ in

1883. It set the seal on his already proliﬁc enquiries into heredity, genius,

natural design which led to the (not precisely equal) ratio of the sexes. Many commentators

insisted on the indissoluble link between fecundity and the best possible economy of nature (La

Vergata 1990). Thus social and physical ills that stymied reproduction were really a blessing in

disguise. Prostitution was deemed by some writers to be a necessary antidote to excessive fecundity

whilst even venereal disease was occasionally mooted as helpful, since indirectly it might curb the

population.

18 Darwin offered some encouragement but did not directly endorse his relative’s more speciﬁc ideas

and proposals. Galton could not accept the implied equation of ﬁtness with fertility, given that the

poor were the most fecund. The struggle for existence, he suggested, as he looked darkly at the

Victorian city, ‘seems to me to spoil and not improve our breed’. On this correspondence, see

Himmelfarb 1952,pp.326–7; Jones 1980,p.100;cf.Forrest1974. For reﬂections on these issues in

The Descent, see Darwin 1871, i,pp.177–8.

19 Darwin occasionally urged his family as well as colleagues to think twice before drawing sharp

political or atheistical conclusions from science. ‘I venture to advise you not to carry the deg radation

principle too far’, he wrote, characteristically, for example, to the zoologist Anton Dohrn (letter, 24

May 1875, in Dohrn 1982,p.63).

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animal breeding, ‘nature and nurture’ (his phrase) and much besides since

the 1860s (Bulmer 2003;Forrest1974).

Deep-seated fears of socio-biological decline as well as exalted hopes

of evolutionary improvement and collective ‘regeneration’ informed such

discussions. In the eugenics movement, to which so many early twentieth-

century intellectuals were to be drawn, a science of racial engineering aimed

to offer appropriate blandishments to ‘the ﬁt’, whilst providing necessary dis-

incentives to ‘the unﬁt’, in order to stem the pathological tide. Eugenics was

supposed to provide a demystifying and liberating corrective to super stition,

sentimentalism and religion, a rational, planned approach to population, in

response to the contemporary bio-political crisis so widely feared.

Galton’s

ideas, combined with those of other European and American theorists and

activists, produced a notable scientiﬁc ﬂurry, now copiously documented in

a secondary literature, which traces the sharply differing national nuances

of the movement. There were journals, lobby groups, university posts, essay

prizes, laboratories and conferences. There were elaborate explorations of

the eugenic implications of new research or argument, such as Weismann’s

theory of the ‘continuity of the germ plasm’. Further complicating the

picture (eventually) was the path-breaking work on inheritance of traits in

pea plants by a priest from Austrian Silesia, Gregor Mendel (1822–84). His

ﬁndings languished in obscurity until ‘rediscovered’ in 1900. Mendel’s work

paved the way for twentieth-century ‘genetics’ (the word itself coined by

William Bateson in 1905).

Often it was the failure of eugenic movements to effect legislative change

that was its most striking feature. Nonetheless, in the USA and later (with

far greater consequences, and on an altogether more violent and appalling

scale), in Nazi Germany, a version of radical eugenic thought was put into

practice. Various American states pioneered laws enabling compulsory ster-

ilisation of the so-called ‘feeble-minded’, often claiming the very best of

motives, but with cruel and tragic personal consequences. Whatever the

motives of early eugenic pioneers in the USA, their policy proposals (and

successes) attracted notice, admiration and sometimes emulation amongst

some European politicians and opinion formers. A full history of the global

consequences of such ideas about compulsory sterilisation during the twen-

tieth century remains to be written, although of course the central modern

European catastrophe, namely the ‘racial state’ that was created in Nazi

20 See Kevles 1985; Searle 1976, 1981. For recent discussion, surveys and further reading lists, see New

Formations, 2007.

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Daniel Pick

Germany, is widely documented. The success of eugenic lobbying in the

period before 1914 was no doubt far more modest than some of its more

extreme campaigners hoped, but some of the outrages that were perpetrated

later on in the name of eugenics, or the necessity of collective ‘hygiene’,

even in non-fascist polities, well into the post-war period, only became

fully apparent towards the end of the century.

Karl Pearson (1857–1936), who became Galton’s equally energetic suc-

cessor in London, argued that ‘only a very thorough eugenic policy can

possibly save our race from the evils which must ﬂow from the antago-

nism between natural selection and medical progress’ (Pearson 1912,p.29).

Pearson had come from a middle-class English Quaker background. After

mathematics at King’s College Cambridge, he had studied law, philosophy

and mathematics in Berlin and Heidelberg. He changed his name from Carl

to Karl and wrote The New Werther in homage to Goethe. He suffered a

personal crisis of faith and wrote a passion play that attacked Christianity.

Having held a chair of mathematics, he became, under Galton’s patron-

age, the professor of eugenics at University College London. Inﬂuenced

by Fichte’s view that the interests of the people were best expressed by

the state, Pearson would come to see himself in the British context as an

iconoclastic rationalist, able to draw German thought, particularly of the

left, together with Darwinism into a socialist advocacy of imperialism. He

was in his own eyes a member of a caste of experts whose views were

above the petty factionalism and distortions of party politics; characteristic

publications were The Ethics of Freethought, which appeared in 1881 and

The Grammar of Science in 1892. Elected to the Royal Society, Pearson was

awarded the Darwin medal in 1898 (Kevles 1985).

Not all eugenicists agreed with Pearson’s views that the state should

do away with class struggle so as to be better able to ﬁght the necessary

war between nations. He argued (with the Boer War in mind) that when

such violence ceased, mankind would no longer progress, for there would

be nothing to check the fertility of inferior stock (Pearson 1905). Early

twentieth-century eugenics provides a complicated story in its own right;

Janus-faced, it turned between anxious laments on the degeneracy of today

and visions of a regenerated and more disciplined tomorrow. It demonstrated

an extreme propensity for ‘mismeasurement’ and the na

ıvety of the attempt

to rise clean above the mud of politics whilst wading neck-deep. Its assertion

that science could deliver such value-free guidance, and moreover that

the eugenics movement could constitute itself as the representative for the

‘scientiﬁc point of view’, was always contested. Its fanciful aspirations and

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The politics of nature

utopian aspirations are nicely exempliﬁed by Galton’s plans for a novel set

in the land of ‘Kantsaywhere’ (Pearson 1914–30, iiia, pp. 411–25).

Galton, Pearson and their associates extolled science as a means to pro-

vide a rational basis for future state population policies. Science was also

advocated as a way to achieve a profound moral awakening of the masses.

Here the eugenics movement had been preﬁgured by earlier stalwarts of

evolutionary politics, such as Spencer and T. H. Huxley. The latter, for

instance had forcefully suggested that science might be both an antidote to

superstition, and an alternative moral agent to religion, a source of inspi-

ration to all toiling labourers. He declared that he wanted ‘the working

classes to under stand that Science and her ways are great facts for them –

that physical virtue is the base of all other and they are to be clean and

temperate and all the rest – not because fellows in black and white ties tell

them so, but because these are plain and patent laws of nature which they

must obey “under penalties”’ (L. Huxley 1900, i,p.138).

Huxley became an indefatigable Sunday Lecturer, the doyen of work-

ing men’s colleges as well as a stalwart of the Royal Institution (where,

from 1856, he had been Fullerian Professor). In his lectures, he emphasised

human nobility: we are from the brutes, but not of them. He envisaged a

morally awakened science battling for the souls of the people with a corrupt

dogmatic church. Yet he also argued for the full separation of evolutionary

study from ethical questions (Huxley 1894). Importantly, he suggested that

the progress of civilisation might involve challeng ing rather than imitating

nature. The separation proposed here, however, between science and social

belief was to prove hardly less chimerical than in Galton’s case. Huxley

drew the lesson that political moderacy ﬂowed naturally from his biology.

His strictures were directed against particular political positions (of the left

and right) rather than against moral or political extrapolations from nature

per se. Evolution might bring good or bad tidings: ‘Retrogressive is as prac-

tical as progressive metamorphosis’ (Huxley 1891,p.17).

Elsewhere, Victorian evolutionary theory was to feature within grand

and sweeping histories of ideas. Although recent historians have greatly

reﬁned such broad-brush interpretations of the clash between ‘Science’ and

‘Religion’, Victorian writers often conceptualised their century as engaged

in a ﬁght to the death between two antithetical modes of thought. Henr y

Thomas Buckle (1821–62), for example, described the ‘terrible struggle

between theology and science, which, having begun in the persecution of

21 The natural scientiﬁc approach was to be extended to history as well as to politics.

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Daniel Pick

science and in the martyrdom of scientiﬁc men, has in these later days,

taken a happier turn, and is now manifestly destroying that old theological

spirit, which has brought so much misery and ruin upon the world’. ‘It

is by science, and by science alone, that these horrible delusions are being

dissipated’ (Buckle 1861, ii,p.596). There appeared to be no place in this

formulation for the emancipatory potential of political thought, still less for

the novel, drama or poetry.

Buckle sought to produce a new science of history, freed from mythology.

An exceptional linguist, traveller and autodidact, his controversial History

of Civilisation in England was ﬁrst published in 1857, going through various

subsequent enlargements. It argued that beneath the apparently random

individuality of human actions lay regular social currents that could be

addressed scientiﬁcally. He cited statistics on crime and death, including

suicide, as well as birth and marriage rates, to illuminate the underlying,

impersonal patterns and the viability of systematic analysis. A fully scientiﬁc

history, declared Buckle, would take in soil, climate and food resources as

well as the chemistry of the body itself.

The war for truth was set out in a different, but no less ambitious syn-

thesis a few years later by Friedrich Lange, businessman, teacher, journalist

and philosopher.

Lange became a professor in Zurich in 1870 and then at

Marburg in Germany from 1872.Hediedin1875, ten years after producing

a monumental study of the history of materialism. Here, knowledge itself

was understood in relation to the principle of struggle. History appeared

as a vast trial for supremacy between religion, idealism and materialism.

Lange noticed how materialism often foundered, lured back towards mys-

ticism. Science could bring intellectual emancipation but, in this respect

like Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Lange wanted to show how it could

easily become trapped in the very spiritual fetters that it believed it had

shaken off. Nonetheless, Lange admired Darwin’s achievements, consider-

ing him perhaps the greatest of moder n demystiﬁers and describing the

tragedy of waste and death which the great Englishman, building on the

foundations of political economy, had shown to operate throughout nature.

‘The struggle for a spot of earth, success or non-success in the persecu-

tion and extermination of other life, determines the propagation of plants

and animals. Millions of spermatozoa, eggs, young creatures hover between

life and death that single individuals may develop themselves’ (Lange 1925,

22 Marx considered Lange’s work confused, ‘sham-science’, a mixture of ‘bombastic ignorance and

intellectual laziness’ (Marx and Engels 1936,p.201).

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The politics of nature

bk. 2,p.35). Nature moved forwards on an immense funeral pyre of redun-

dant ‘unﬁt’ individuals. We have to recognise our world as an ‘ocean of

birth and death’, an ‘eternal slaughter of the weak’ (Lange 1925, bk. 2,

p. 36). It was a short step from such descriptions of nature’s waste-disposal

system to the endorsement of war as a natural event, even a necessary form

of collective catharsis. Treitschke, Von Bernhardi and even, on occasion,

Nietzsche, would notoriously draw evolution this way, linking prolonged

periods of peace with lethargy and decay (Moore 2002a; Pick 2003); there

were writers of other nationalities, French and British amongst them, who

spoke in similarly brazen terms.

Wild militarist claims were undoubtedly made in the name of Darwin;

yet one must also ask what it was about his work that so easily lent itself

to such appropriation in the ﬁrst place.

A memorable war metaphor had

appeared after all in the famous concluding passage of The Origin:

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which

we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly

follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been

originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone

cycling on according to the ﬁxed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless

forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. (Darwin

1964,pp.459–60)

At that point in his discussion, Darwin was anxious to insist that he was not

providing an ignoble conception of the world, after all those ferocious ‘dog

eat dog’ descriptions in his text, but many late Victorian and Edwardian

readers were more impressed by the bellicose than the paciﬁc references

and sympathised with Darwin’s own increasingly gloomy socio-political

intimations in The Descent of Man.

Nietzsche’s attitude to Darwinian ideas was to prove especially impor-

tant, as well as particularly complex and malleable. Scrutiny of Nietzsche

here may also serve to underline the point that the intellectual assault that

took place during the second half of the nineteenth century on ortho-

dox morals and religion der ived from a variety of philosophical positions

23 Debate about the bellicosity (or otherwise) of Darwin’s work in particular, and evolutionary thought

and eugenics in general has been studied in various monographs (for instance, Crook 1994;Stepan

1987).

24 In The Origin, Darwin proposed that one might ‘look with some conﬁdence to a secure future of

equally inappreciable length’ and had insisted that ‘natural selection works solely by and for the

good of each being, all corporeal and mental developments will tend to progress towards perfection’

(Darwin 1964,p.489), but The Descent was tinged with doubt about the years to come: ‘We must

remember that progress is no invariable rule’ (Darwin 1871, i,p.177).

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and cultural sources, quite apart from Darwin. Some aspects of Nietzsche’s

shattering diagnosis of Judaeo-Christian values in The Genealogy of Morals,

for instance, could be reconciled, no doubt, with other militant forms of

scientiﬁc materialist thought in this period, but its intellectual roots, pur-

poses and consequences ran far wider. Nonetheless, Nietzche’s thought

clearly drew upon, and entered into dialogue with, the ideas of Darwin

and Spencer. He kept abreast of contemporary natural science and had

followed recent developments in psychiatry and criminology as well. He

had paid sharply close attention to Lange’s history of materialism and often

seemed to rely on it for his information about modern science (Stack 1983).

But if we compare Nietzsche’s thought with that of any of the immedi-

ate Darwinian circle, it is the differences of ambition, argument, implied

reader, style, rhetorical purpose, intellectual context and sensibility that

seem ultimately more striking and signiﬁcant than the similarities.

Certainly references to natural selection, struggle for existence and the

possibility of bio-medical degeneration seasoned many of Nietzsche’s broad-

sides against weak will and slavishness (Moore 2002a, pp. 126–7). He also

admired Darwin’s devastating assault on teleolog ical thinking. On the other

hand, Nietzsche sometimes rejected what he took to be a kind of anthropo-

morphism in the evolutionists’ accounts of nature and decried the pettiness,

grubbiness and superﬁciality of what he believed that they so often found

there. Thus in The Gay Science (1882), amidst aphoristic revelations about

the death of God and the possibility of eternal recurrence, he took a swipe at

the ‘incredibly one-sided doctrine of “the struggle for existence”’ and sug-

gested that this reﬂected the relatively humble social origins of many natural

scientists. Born of the common people – their ancestors poor and lowly

folks, who ‘knew all too intimately the difﬁculty of scraping by’ – they con-

ceptualised a nature in their own image – governed by distress, scarcity and

want. Instead the philosopher stressed abundance, preponderance and force.

The very intensity and passion of Nietzsche’s style and argument seemed to

echo his argument: the drive towards expression, g rowth and domination

operated inside us, and remorselessly in nature itself. He painted a landscape

in which creatures were not merely intent on survival and struggle, but gave

free rein to the will to power (Nietzsche 2001, bk. 5, section 349,p.208).

Although Nietzsche applauded scientiﬁc methodology for its bracing

and liberating potential – bringing myths, and indeed all commonplaces,

radically into question – he also implied that the quest for ‘tr uth’, as extolled

by the likes of T. H. Huxley, was a disguised version of the metaphysical

faith that science supposedly eschewed: ‘even we knowers of today, we

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godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our ﬁre too, from the ﬂame lit by the

thousand-year old faith, the Christian faith which was also Plato’s faith,

that God is truth; that truth is divine’ (Nietzsche 2001, bk. 5, section 344,

p. 201; Nietzsche’s emphasis). But what, Nietzsche mused, if this were

to become more and more difﬁcult to believe, if nothing more were to

turn out to be divine except error, blindness, the lie? What if God himself

were to turn out to be our longest lie? Throughout, Nietzsche wrestled

with different conceptions of science, pulled between ‘rejection, enthusiasm

and ambivalence’ (Moore and Brobjer 2004,p.15). Some have sought to

periodise his attitudes to the natural sciences. Thus the metaphysician of

the early phase, inﬂuenced by Schopenhauer and inspired by Wagner, railed

against all vestiges of Socratic rationalism (The Birth of Tragedy). Then, having

broken with Wagner, Nietzsche sought a cure for his youthful romantic

pessimism in the hard truths of science (Human, All too Human, The Gay

Science) (see Moore 2002a, 2002b; cf. Moore and Brobjer 2004,p.15). Finally

came the reassertion of art over science, or at least of a new conjuncture of art

and science. In the Late Notebooks, the tragic view of existence predominated

and the desiccated rationalism of modern culture was once again eschewed:

science risked fatally stripping the world of all meaning; art stood a better

chance of doing justice to the contingent nature of existence.

Yet shifts

and ambiguities occur more locally too. The very idea of the ‘will to power’

was both metaphysical, a universal force more basic than natural selection,

and also, in another vein, an attempted internal revision of Darwinism itself

(Richardson 2004,p.12). Nietzsche perhaps found his own moments of

consolation in privileging Lamarck over Darwin: internal effort and striving

could thus count in the transmisions to future generations (Stack 1983, 180;

cf. Moore and Brobjer 2004).

A less well-noted afﬁnity between Nietzsche and Darwin may lie rather

in their shared, ambivalent struggle to accommodate the materialist ideas

and model of natural selection. Just as Nietzsche restlessly shifted his ground

in pondering evolutionar y science, so Darwin worried away at his ﬁnd-

ings. Some of the harsher and more ‘Nietzschean’ moments in Darwin’s

texts contrast with softer sentiments he expressed in notebooks and letters;

elsewhere the reverse. Inevitably, the more Darwin is explored in detail,

the more received images of his outlook can look like caricature. Drawing

on voluminous correspondence, biographer s have carefully teased out his

varying reactions to speciﬁc Victorian campaigns, from birth control and

25 On Darwin, biology and Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’, see Richardson 2004.

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Daniel Pick

vivisection to chimney sweeping: ‘It makes one shudder to fancy one of

one’s own children at 7 years old being forced up a chimney – to say nothing

of the consequent loathsome disease, and ulcerated limbs, and utter moral

degradation.’

We can note his passing comments on slavery (a ‘sin’);

track his sympathies for nations involved in speciﬁc wars;

or identify his

attitude to Governor Eyre, the man who had violently put down a rebellion

in the British West Indies in a scandal that led John Stuart Mill to organise

a campaign for his prosecution (Darwin subscribed £10 to the costs of the

action against him).

And in these miscellaneous opinions on the issues of

the day, we can establish the causes with which he sympathised and those

that disgusted him. But the gaps and contradictions, or sometimes the sheer

lack of comment on domestic and world events, are just as striking. There

are moments where Darwin changed the stream of conventional thought

about race, evolution and nature; other occasions where he seems more

thoughtlessly to have reproduced the platitudes of his time: hence the plau-

sibility of Nietzsche’s praise for the pioneering, demystifying Darwin and

his criticism of the evolutionist’s too narrow acceptance of contemporary

beliefs.

3 Nature and inequality

Philosophy was by no means the only ﬁeld in which Darwinism inﬂuenced,

but certainly did not bring into existence, harsh critique of morals and reli-

gious orthodoxies. Racial anthropology was another. The popular furore

in Britain surrounding the aforementioned Governor Eyre or, a few years

26 Darwin 1989, v,p.84. Darwin had been reading Mayhew on chimney sweeping at the time (March

1852) and became a contributor to a society set up to prosecute those who break the law on the

matter; see ibid.

27 Darwin 1945,p.36 and Colp 1987,p.24. Fitzroy, captain of the Beagle, on the other hand condoned

slavery, which had led to several quarrels between him and Darwin. For Darwin’s relatively progressive

belief on this matter, alongside Mill’s, as to the need to impeach Governor Eyre after the Jamaica

Massacre, see Semmel 1962. In his private correspondence, Darwin sometimes saw himself as a

slave, or in his word, ‘nigger’, dominated by his work, isolated, labouring to prove his worth to

hostile colleagues. This word was also used, queasily for us, but comfortably for them, as a term of

endearment; he called himself Emma’s (i.e. his wife’s) ‘nigger’; she replied fondly to ‘My dearest N.’

See Colp 1987,p.25.

28 Take this remark on the Franco-Prussian War in a letter to H. Settegast 29 September 1870): ‘Every

one whom I know in England is an enthusiastic wisher for the full and complete success of Germany’

(Darwin and Seward 1903, i,p.324). When Paris fell, however, Darwin expressed his sorrow for the

French people; see Desmond and Moore 1991,p.578.

29 Note that Wallace, Darwin, Lyell, Huxley and Spencer were all on the same side in this debate. See

Desmond and Moore 1991,p.540.

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earlier, the ‘Indian Mutiny’ reﬂected and shaped new increasingly deter-

minist attitudes to race. From around the mid-nineteenth century, ‘race’

was indeed becoming a more signiﬁcant and central concept in Western

thought, ascribed major explanatory signiﬁcance in understanding political

and social questions – everything from economic inequalities to national

crime statistics, from the justice of imperial conquest to the capacity (or

lack of it) for creative thought and artistic achievement. Whilst neither the

concept of race nor the existence of racial prejudice were new, gathering

‘scientiﬁc’ interest in and fear about the immutable causes and effects of

human racial difference were evident in many quarters. Whatever disagree-

ments followed, the utility of the concept of race itself was often placed

beyond argument.

The end results of racial mixing (miscegenation) constituted the cen-

tral preoccupation in Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races

(1853–5), a French work whose direct inﬂuence, negligible at the time,

grew stronger by the last quarter of the century. Natural racial laws could

not be gainsaid, declared the Scottish author, Robert Knox, sometimes

dubbed in the twentieth century ‘the father of British racism’. It is per-

haps true that his book, The Races of Men, ﬁrst published in 1850, has been

more carefully scrutinised by recent historians of race than by his immedi-

ate contemporaries, but his contention that ‘race is everything: literature,

science, art – in a word, civilisation depends on it’ pithily characterised an

increasingly commonplace view. Richard Wagner’s contemporaneous anti-

Semitic study, Judaism in Music, was another striking production. We may

now see it as an ominous landmark of racist invective, presag ing worse to

come. Yet its intellectual signiﬁcance was by no means widely hailed at the

outset.

As this suggests, an inventory of late Victorian commentators who took

such authors, or at least some aspect of their more strident personal views,

to task, might well be longer than a list of those who simply extolled

them. Nonetheless, in diverse ways, biological and anthropological myths

were insidiously reshaping assumptions about the shared physical, moral

or psychological features of humanity. In the history of anti-Semitism, for

instance, a substantial shift (evident in ﬁction, social and political commen-

tary, and the sciences) can be observed across the nineteenth century from

a primarily religious deﬁnition of the Jew (in which allegiance, ‘belief’, was

understood to be determining of identity) to the notion of the Jew as mem-

ber of a ‘race’ marked apart for ever by inheritance and given character. In

parallel, national identiﬁcation was less and less to be understood in terms

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